Ruby (35 page)

Alone on the hill the black book flipped wind-thin pages, spine open on the earth. Ruby lay on her side and watched as they flipped this way and that, this and that, catching the moon in their white. Her body was untouched, unharmed, still she did not move, could not move, only watch the wind and the paper for hours, her heart pounding soft in her chest, until the black night became gray, and gray became the pink of sunrise, and pink
became yellow, which became hot white and the pages dried from morning dew and started turning again. She heard a buckboard easing down the road, some kind of tittering as it rolled steadily by. Lucky that it was a back road, lucky not one single human paused at her door. Finally, as the evening settled, Ruby heard the black bird cutting the air with a gentle clucking. She crawled towards it, then discovering the knife still in her hand, brick brown sticking between her fingers, she plunged it into the earth and dragged her body after her. It seemed impossible to use her legs, unthinkable to stand. In this way she made it to the chinaberry as the sun was dipping over the western horizon, orange and plum streaking after it.

The crow stood stock-still on a low branch. One night, one day and another evening with no water, no food, barely taking in enough air. The crow would wait like that until the next morning, not breathing too deeply, lest it ruffle the air around the girl. Ruby wrapped herself about the tree trunk and did not cry.

I
t was Miss P who found Ruby after three weeks and one day of being lost to God and man. She found her half alive by Marion Lake. Chewed dandelion greens in her mouth, hair twisted with twigs and pebbles. She had wasted to nothing but still held tight to the knife. Miss P had been scouring the woods every evening where she imagined Ruby might hide. When she saw the girl, she eased the knife from her limp hand.

Ruby felt like air against Miss P’s side as she walked her back to P & K Market, and she fell like cotton onto the little cot kept inside the market closet. She gave the girl dandelion root tea with a touch of ginger, and sweetened it with honey. She watched Ruby take a sip without fully waking. She saw the warmth spread onto the child’s lips, her face. Then Ruby was asleep again.

Next, Miss P gave her a spoonful of chicken broth, with big chunks of celery and clear onion. Ruby swallowed it down, then leaned up sharply, eyes jutting about the room. Ruby looked down at her hand, then began feeling for her knife.

“Ain’t no need for that, child.”

Ruby jerked up from the bed. Panic streaked across her face and Miss P tried to calm her, told her that she was perfectly safe, that nobody was going to hurt her, but Ruby stood and tried to run to the door. She fell against the frame and sunk to the floor.

She did not escape until the fifth day, after she had regained some small bit of strength. Miss P did not try to stop her, just as she had not tried to stop her mama, Charlotte Bell, forty-one years ago, when she ran from rape, from hate and a small brown baby named Ruby Bell. Ran to Newton, to Beaumont, and eventually to some old city folks had thought to call New York.

R
UBY RAN
down the road to Bell land, stopping to catch her breath, then running on. She wanted her knife. The guns pointing in a circle like they had at her Auntie Neva, the cord wrapped around Tanny’s throat, Abby Millhouse’s missing kneecap, Ephram Jennings being dragged away from her home. Ruby knew she needed her knife as a small little match against the night.

The road cut into her feet. The road was her enemy as well, dragging against her, pulling her back to P & K, back to the wolves. She fought her way home, fought her way to her children.

When she reached Bell land she stopped dead. There were no mewling whispers, no cries, no little hands reaching through the soil. The ground was as hollow as an empty womb. She leapt onto the rises, digging furiously, yanking up tufts of soil, huge gulps of dying grass, soft clay and mud; she tore earthworms from their home and cast a dozen roly-polys out of the crumbling brown.

“Where?
WHERE? ARE? THEY?
”

Even the crow was silent in the tree. Even the pines turned away. Ruby knew they had been powerless to stop him, powerless to save all of the children who landed in the Dyboù’s gullet while she rested on a soft bed only a mile away from home.

She let out a scream, a mighty screech that boomed up to the treetops, careening so that it pierced the tangle of branches and
flew out of the piney woods, out of the burning atmosphere, bolting into space.

Ephram heard her from the road he had been walking to Bell land. He gingerly, carefully picked up an ounce of speed and made it to his Ruby.

He had been dragged away over three weeks ago, the night Ruby had cut into his belly full up to the knife’s handle. The night the congregation nearly killed him, dropping him on his head while trying to drag him away. Over three weeks in the Jasper County Hospital due to an infection, due to the fact that his liver had been “lacerated” and his bowels nicked. He had lost so much blood, the White doctor said, not particularly interested in looking Ephram in the face, that he should, in fact, be dead. It was Miss P’s call that pushed Ephram out of the bed. Away from the smooth brown faces of the Women’s Auxiliary, who plied him with fried chicken and pound cake, even though the nurses insisted he eat soup and crackers until his belly healed up. Away from Celia, who, despite his objection to her presence, stayed every minute of posted visiting hours, and sometimes beyond, propping up his pillow, slipping on clean socks and combing his hair. All the while humming the tune of “At the Cross, at the Cross Where I First Saw the Light.”

The walk had been a hard one. While his stitches had been removed two days before, he was still weak.

Ephram stood over Ruby. He saw the narrow spokes of Ruby’s legs, the reed crook of her arms. She wept as if her entire body were the rising heaves and scratching sobs.

There was nothing to say and so he just stood there, letting the soft of his eyes gently stroke her hair.

She spoke to him, without turning, without moving her lips from the earth, “They all gone.”

“Tell me—”

“My babies.
My babies …
They gone.”

Ephram felt the air leave his chest. He breathed in her sorrow, and knelt beside her.

Her eyes leveled at him. “Get away from here.”

Her words pushed him back like a fist.

“Go on. Get.”

“I ain’t, Ruby …”

“What else you want?”

“I want you.”

“And what it gone cost?” Hot tears ran down her cheeks. “What I gotta pay to have you?”

“They was wrong, Celia and them, they was worse than fools. But it weren’t me. You put a knife in me.” He lifted his shirt and showed the bandage looped about his right side. “And I’m yet here. Let me help you, baby. Let’s find your children.”

She said it flat and deadpan, “I’ll do it again.”

Ephram stood very still and looked at her. She was broken, more than broken—her eyes were empty, deathly.

“No, you won’t, Ruby.”

A cord snapped inside of Ruby. She threw buckshot and nails in Ephram’s direction. “
What else
you come to take? You got what was left of my mind. You bring them here to take my children. What else you want?”

She slammed into him, scratching at his neck, grinding against him. Ephram tried to push her away but she hung on like a panther, face-to-face, yanking his hand between her legs.

“You just a man! Can’t even admit that you came here to get your dick sucked.”

Ephram pushed her back and held her at arm’s length.
“Stop it!”

“You hang-dog country motherfucker. I like to spit after you first kiss me.”

Ephram broke through. “You kiss me, woman! Don’t let sorrow steal ’way truth. Don’t blaspheme who we is.”

“You right. I kiss you. After I fucked Chauncy,” she lied.

Ephram stood with his hands about her rib cage. A part of him froze.

“You walk up right after we finish. Remember? How we—Chauncy and me—laughed at you. Lord, I needed a real man after being around your limp punk ass.”

Ephram shot out, “You think I’m a fool? You think I don’t know what you been doing since you come to this town? What you doing now? You think I like it? Naw!
Naw!
But I know how life don’t teach you no different. Like a fox can’t stop chewing at his own leg after it been in a trap.”

He watched her anger as it began shaking her center, breaking apart.
“Ain’t no trap but the one you fixed for me. You dress it up with marriage, pancakes and maple syrup! Fix me up so you can bend me over! Act all deaconly and holy but I know what you come for! Even if you don’t! And you don’t! Can’t admit it now!”

Ruby fell down onto the ground and lifted her dress. She spread her legs and pushed down her panties. “
This
what you
want
? Don’t be afraid to take it like Chauncy and all them other men you call friend. You only here for two reasons—cuz I’m a crazy cunt like your mama, and cuz you want to fuck me. I know you. I see you. Seen men like you since I was six.”

“I ain’t none of them men.”

She leapt up. “
I ain’t nothing but a whore!
I want your food, your money—that’s all. I can pretend like I want anything, even a moose in heat. Ain’t you been laughed at your whole fucking life? There’s good reason for it. You a servant to your own sister? Cuz you a coward and a fool.”

Ephram started, “Ruby—you care for me. I feel it like an ax in my chest.”

Ruby screamed the knot from her throat. “Why you think them flowers and blue napkins do shit for me? Why you think building me up like a queen what I need? Doing every little thing before I ask and never letting me give nothing back. That don’t make me no queen. That makes me a cripple. But you need to fuck broken. You need to love crazy. Right? Right?”

“Ruby … I know what you doing. I know—”

“What do you know?”

“I know you love me.” He was gulping for air, sobs catching, then breaking free.

“So what if I love you? I’m the fucking fool for it. You got the kind of love that keeps me from rising. That make me take my eye from my children, make me lose my children. One of us got to die we stay together … by my hand. You want that? So you get from here before I kill you. I see you on my land again, I’ll kill you.”

Ephram took one step back, then two. The knife had hurt less. He turned and stumbled, then he began to run. He ran past P & K, and past the whole congregation of men on the porch. He felt every eye on him, judging and laughing at him. He ran collecting shame and self-hate like pollen on a daisy hill. He ran all the way to Celia’s house, where he stepped in the door, walked past Celia, straight to his bedroom and lay down on the chenille spread.

Celia stood just outside his door, her hand soft on the wood. Ephram was safe. All that she had done was to keep him safe from the pit fires of life. Safe from the haints killing souls in the woods. From the Devil, who walked the earth. Safe from Ruby, who had dragged her papa to hell, who had cut her brother—her boy—and nearly killed him. Ruby Bell, whom he would learn to love a little less every day … every day he was with her.

Celia said calm as a still sea, “I done made your favorite, Ephram, fried pork chops, greens and corn bread with a pinch of sugar—just the way you like it.”

In less than ten minutes Ephram would wash his hands. He would dry them on Celia’s dress towel, with the pink ribbon stitched on. He would sit at her table and eat every scrap of her food along with the yellow cake with chocolate frosting she had made just that morning. He would hand her his plate and let her wash every dish and clean every sign of life from the kitchen. Then he would bathe and dress for bed and read marked passages in his well-used Bible.

Once he had done all of these things, Celia came in and sat beside him on the bed.

“How you feeling, boy?”

It felt as if a stone had set upon his chest. All he could manage was, “I ain’t no boy, Celia.”

“I know that Ephram.”

She placed her hand on his forehead to make sure he didn’t have a fever.

“Let me see your dressing.”

“Not now.”

“Doctor say we got to change it every day.”

He looked straight at her, “Not today, Celia.”

She backed away and stood.

“I go to Jasper tomorrow, get me some more of that gauze and iodine. And that special grease they be rubbing on your scar.”

Ephram said nothing. He simply set his Bible down and turned out his light.

Celia almost said,
Glad you home
, but decided to let well enough alone. But she thought it so loud, Ephram heard it anyway.

She slipped out of the door as Ephram lay atop his bedspread, too tired to crawl under the covers. He turned to his side, ready to bide the years until he slipped into grateful oblivion.

R
uby no longer wandered through the piney woods. Instead she hunted, searched, ripping away branches until her fingers scraped and bled. She knew their souls were still alive. She heard them on the wind at times like flutes, until they faded around a bend in the trees. Ruby felt them—held, bound like a spider’s feast.

Ruby called to them as she walked until her voice became sandpaper. She returned home each night to eat the bread, fruit and beef jerky Miss P left her during the week. Not to satisfy any hunger. There was no hunger. There was no pain nor joy. She ate to keep walking. She ate to sustain her breath. She ate so that she could find her babies before it was too late.

So when Chauncy came looking for her early one Saturday morning, she picked up the shovel Ephram had brought and hit him upside the head. Hard, so that he fell out cold in her front yard. When Ruby came back that evening, fingers bloody, he was still there in a heap on the ground. As she stuffed food into her mouth he came to, stumbled home, weaving and leaning in the dim evening.

He came back the next day with a nasty lump on the side of his head and a package of mean stowed in his gut. This time when Ruby swung the shovel Chauncy caught it and threw it to the ground so hard it broke in two. The tail end of a shadow flapped
behind him, which is how she knew the Dyboù was living inside of the man like a dead rat poisoning a well.